I'm on the mailing list of a "cold caller" and I always look forward to his weekly email.

It amazes me that there is nothing new, in fact I see this with so many "sales gurus" who hit us with their best shot, like "make one more call".  The world is apocalyptic with social unheval, political unrest and a global pandemic and this is supposed to be solved by sending one more email or making one more call.  Or doing what we did before the Pandemic. Really?

In his book "Sell the way you Buy" David Priemer talks about the time he ran a team of outbound Salespeople at Salesforce (SFDC) and they merrily spent the day cold calling, emailing, texting, in fact doing anything they could to get meetings and "push" people through the sales funnel.

The David talks about how he gets home and he spends all his time trying to stop his time being hijacked by salespeople who seem to spend all their time trying to bombard him with call, emails, texts; trying to get him to buy something.

Hence, why he called his book "sell the way you buy".

He also talks about the rise of the "Unconscious Seller".  He explains, this to be that sellers, sell the way they are taught to sell.  If the person is told to make 100 dials a day, then that's what they do, they don't think or ask if there is more efficient and effective ways to sell.

The wheels started falling off sales and marketing way before the pandemic. 

There has been a clear divergence between analogue and digital companies.

In November 2019, 12 months ago, BMW in the UK got 28 pieces of inbound on Linkedin, they converted 14 of these.  Let's assume that the average price of a BMW is $50,000, that means they sold $700,000 of BMWs, for zero marketing cost.  So what?

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) their competition?  They shut down their plant because of the lack of sales last November.  They blamed it on Brexit, the UK General Election and market conditions.  But they are the same market conditions that BMW found themselves under, but BMW increased sales.

BMW are digital, JLR are analogue, even back 12 months ago a gap started to show in business. 

The world is shifting, the world is shifting online and the buyer is blocking you, maybe making one more call isn't going to help you make your number this year.  Let's look at some research. 

B2B Buyers Hate The Tactics From Sellers and Marketers

Recent research from TrustRadius from September 2020 states

"When asked what their marketing pet peeves were, buyers’ number one and two responses were marketing emails and sales cold calls. While this isn’t exactly surprising (who loves cold calls?), it highlights the growing disconnect between tech marketers and their buyers."

"Digging deeper, we asked buyers how likely they would be to respond to these tactics. Unsurprisingly, over 90% of buyers say they are “not likely at all”  to respond to non-personalized messages and cold calls."

This is pretty damning indictment on current sales and marketing

95% of people ignore emails

93 % of people ignore cold calls

90% of people ignore chatbots

81% of people ignore targeted ads

57% of people ignore notices about online events

This is a damning indictment of the world of sales and marketing today ... it would be wrong for me to say that all the money spent of sales and marketing is wasted, but a good percentage of it. 

This is the Reason Your Company Needs To Digitalise

This October (2020) report by Simon Kemp outlines the extent that social media has become part of our lives.  

Worldwide social media users: 4.14 billion - 53% of the world's population use social media in other words, more people use social media than don't use it.

Simon says that "two thirds of the working population in the world is now active on social media."

How much research do you need to convince you? 

Mckinsey say so, Gartner say so, Hootsuite and We Are Social say so, Hubspot say so, Google say so, MIT say so, Trustradius say so ....

What Got You Here Won't Get You There

Everytime we run our social selling programs, we always get 30% increase in revenue and a 40% reduction in the sales cycle.

There are also some softer benefits, you and your team get a new life skill and as a leader you are providing the business with a digital legacy.  Supporting the transformation to digital for the business.

Here is a great example of somebody who launched his business during the pandemic, but is not laying people off but expanding. 

Where Do We Go From Here?

Just give me, or one of the DLA Ignite team and hour of your time and we can walk you through what we are doing for other companies.  No hard sell, just take you through what other companies are doing to transform.

Please contact me here or one of the DLA Ignite team here, so please pick one of our industry experts or one of our experts in your geographical locality.  Our website is here.